


Playing for Time

by Morbane



Category: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Genre: Canon Divergence, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Established Relationship, F/F, Rule 63 (background)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:41:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24875563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: Lessa refuses Search; ten Turns later, Menolly Impresses. In between, Thread falls on a desperately unprepared Weyr.But Benden's weyrfolk are far from giving up. And Lessa - and her foster-daughter, Jaxa - still have a part to play in the salvation of Pern.
Relationships: Menolly & Robinton, Menolly/Mirrim (Dragonriders of Pern)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 45
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	Playing for Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [basketofnovas (slashmarks)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/gifts).



In the wide Lower Caverns, where Benden Weyrfolk gathered when the occasion called for urgency, celebration, or comfort, Menolly waited by the dais. She stood with her head bowed and her back straight. She was as ready as she could be, for only the second time in her life, to sing the Deathsong.

The drum she held in her hands was one of her own making. Traditionally, the Deathsong was not accompanied by any other instrument. Her last rendition had been performed to the slap of waves and the stroke of oars. This time, fire lizards and dragons would hum in harmony. The increasing musicality of the dragons, since Menolly had come to the Weyr, was a sore point with its Weyrwoman, Kylara, who brooked no insubordination and was cannily alert to any influence that might challenge hers. However, as others had pointed out on Menolly's behalf, Menolly had not the rank to compel the dragons either to sing or to desist. If she could encourage them towards a greater precision of melody, that was the most that could be asked of her.

The space began to fill. Menolly recognised the riders of her own wing: hastily cleaned up, as she was, from the Threadfall this morning over Igen that had claimed B'rant and Fanth. Few others were scored, as if to set the tragedy in especially cruel relief. F'lar's, S'lan's, and S'lel's wings had fought Thread together, and it was F'lar's wing who came in nearly last to the cavern, the gap in their ranks conspicuous. Then entered the newest riders to return through time to fight on behalf of Benden Weyr. They were quiet, respectful, but less affected than others present. They had had a year to mourn C'gan, their guide, whose death had only just been communicated to the contemporary Weyr, and few had known B'rant.

The Weyrleader and Weyrwoman entered last. Menolly bowed to them, and stepped up to the dais when they had taken their places. She breathed in deeply, her eyes clear, and felt her dragon's reassurance in the back of her mind, steadying her. "For B'rant and Fanth," she announced, projecting her voice from wall to wall. "For C'gan and Tagath."

As she began the second verse, Kylara's prized fire lizard queen entered the hall and - flying directly past her mistress - came to join Menolly's own humming fair. Menolly neither let her expression change, nor checked the Weyrwoman's. The scowl that Kylara would be wearing was as familiar to Menolly as the references she used to go _between_.

After the Deathsong, she paused only briefly before taking up her gitar, motioning another rider forward to accompany her, and beginning a livelier tune. In the Seahold of her birth, a funeral was solemn from start to finish. In the Weyr, moods swung more wildly. No Thread was expected to fall across land tomorrow - which was why the newest riders' return had been planned for today. Therefore the wine would flow freely, with tacit permission given to court an aching head in the morning. Menolly held the attention and the voices of the Weyr for two more songs, and after that, nodded to B'refli to take over for a time. He had a clear, well-supported tenor, was still fresh, and knew better than to try to compete with the gathering hubbub in the cavern, as the Weyrfolk ate, drank, and shared anecdotes about B'rant and C'gan and older stories of all those who had gone before them.

The authority of Weyrharper sat strangely on Menolly's shoulders, and not just because it was unfamiliar and unconfirmed. Eight Turns of her life ago - though not even four, in contemporary reckoning - music had been a fragile treasure, her access to it threatened always by her father's disapproval. Half Circle Sea Hold had no use for a girl who made her own music and played it, too. 

But Benden Weyr did - when that girl arrived at the Weyr with the nine fire lizards that she had Impressed on an isolated beach. Both Benden Weyr and the Harper Hall had offered her welcome after dragons had rescued her from Threadfall and discovered her talents, and Benden's claim had prevailed. 

Then, she had assumed that she would stay at Benden as a candidate for Impression until she either Impressed a new queen, or grew too old to be presented at a Hatching. Not so. 

As she learned, the great dragons that protected all of Pern, possessing the wondrous ability to travel instantaneously between distant places, could also go _between_ to other times. Without their timing ability to call on, the last Weyr of Pern would have already lost its lonely fight against Thread. Timing was crucial to allow fighting wings to rise over Ista immediately after fighting at Fort, or to allow an unready Weyr to respond to a new emergency. But even more audaciously, travel through time was employed so that dragons not yet Hatched could mature to fighting strength. Only two months after arriving at Benden, Menolly was sent back in time to live for four Turns on the Southern Continent of five decades prior. She went with forty other candidates, Benden's newest queen, Wirenth, and a handful of mature dragons and riders.

C'gan had been one of those riders. One of the oldest dragonmen in the Weyr, he had lived through the time that they were travelling to, and could bring to mind the precise references that were necessary to ensure the travellers arrived safely. It had not mattered, then, that the Weyr was left without a Harper to instruct children in the Teaching Songs, to entertain the Weyr at its gatherings, to drum codes across the valley to Benden Hold, or to help keep the records, because the departing party was set to return in five days of contemporary time.

In the five days that passed for Benden Weyr, four Turns passed on the Southern Continent. For four Turns, Menolly worked and learned and grew into her gangly height and uncharted talent. She practiced music with C'gan, learned how a Weyr was run from the weyrwoman Brekke and her fosterling Mirrim, and discovered that there was no limit to the joy and wonder that came from riding a dragon.

Menolly wondered if Kylara would have insisted so fiercely on the Weyr's right to claim her, Menolly, if she had known that Menolly would go on to Impress blue Heralth instead of a queen - an occasion for which none of Benden Weyr's records yielded precedent.

That first southern expedition had upended Weyr tradition in so many ways that Benden's senior riders had been confounded by the choice of what to be most outraged about. More than half of the party had found fire lizards, and Impressed them with help from Menolly. Mirrim had also impressed a fighting dragon, green Path. And it was brown Canth, not a bronze dragon, who had mated with Brekke's Wirenth.

But the southern expedition had delivered on all of its promises - and delivered a fourth golden queen for Benden to join Pridith and Segrith, placing Brekke and Wirenth beyond reproach, if not beyond envy. Neither of the senior queens' first clutches had yielded gold.

All the new riders had been needed to fight Thread - even the unexpected female riders. Mirrim and Menolly had done what they could to save Pern from its ancient enemy: the shining parasite that fell from beyond the sky and devoured organic tissue unless seared or drowned. Returning to Southern to Benden had been a jarring adjustment for the riders, but it helped that the draconic perspective was far, far simpler. They went where Thread fell, secure in the purpose for which they had been bred.

Many things could be endured, if one had a purpose!

For three Turns, haggard and glorious, with Pridith, Segrith, and Wirenth rising frequently to mate, and with riders scrupulously following Timing protocol to avoid painful re-instruction in the legendarily harsh lessons of the early Pass, it had seemed as though Benden Weyr would succeed - again against ancient precedent - in fighting Thread alone.

Then Thread had begun to fall outside of the Weyrleader's scrupulous predictions, and to increase their numbers again, Wirenth and the new queen Arwith had been sent back to Southern. Back in time again.

C'gan had agreed to guide the endeavour again despite his fading hearing and swollen joints. He had gone despite the double-Timing strain that affected him uniquely, because only he had been alive in the time he led the others to. Menolly had known it was a possibility that the old rider would come to the end of his life a continent and decades away. But she had spoken to him less than a sevenday before she sang for him, and even the worry had not fully settled in her mind. This morning, the second Southern expedition had returned - all but C'gan. 

How many mentors would she farewell in this way? How many weyrfolk - old and young - would she lead the mourning for, before the Pass was out?

Would Mirrim mourn for her; would she mourn for Mirrim?

Her fire lizards' faceted eyes whirled slowly with sorrow, and the light drum was heavy in her hands as she resumed the dais.

* * *

"Crack dust, black dust, turn in freezing air." Menolly led the song, and then pointed to young Isardon to continue it.

"Waste dust..." He screwed up his face, thinking hard. He found it easier to start from further back, but the other children didn't, and Tarkul in particular grew sulky if he thought the parts were uneven. "Waste dust..." At least she'd drilled them in one point of courtesy; all of the children of this age knew not to break in without invitation if they knew an answer but hadn't been asked.

"Face dust!" a wry voice suggested from the cavern entrance. Isardon frowned, uncertain if he was being mocked, then the speaker ducked into view and shared a grin with him to show that the joke, too, was shared.

"Master Robinton, you know better than that," Menolly said, mock-stern as much to keep her face from splitting in a welcoming smile as to continue the tone he had set.

He gave as good as he got. "Do I? Do you know me better than I know myself, blue harper?" 

_Blue harper, harper blue_... Menolly never could resist the rhythm of a new song idea from calling to her, even though she'd have to be Robinton's age before she thought she'd be shameless enough to write a song _just_ about herself.

"On a day you don't know the Ballad of Moreta's Ride..." 

"Oh, very well. Tell me what went before," he said to Isardon.

"Waste dust," Isardon replied, fighting not to giggle as Robinton's eyebrows went up comically at _waste_.

"Ahah. Waste dust, _space_ dust..." He gestured back to Isardon, so natural and assured a gesture that it swept away the boy's hesitation.

"From Red Star bare."

"So it is, so it is. Bare as a cupboard after a herd of hungry lads like yourself have been fed from it! There's no end to the hunger of Thread." The note of laughter faded into the air, its absence distinct. Just like that, the Masterharper compelled his audience's solemn attention. He nodded conclusively.

"Menolly, a word with you."

He led her out of the cavern, a hand at her elbow. "I know you didn't expect me today," he said. "But the Weyr requested my advice, and now that I've given it, I think it would suit you very well to take a lesson at the Harper Hall. I've S'lan's permission. You're to return tomorrow."

"S'lan," Menolly repeated, unable to think of a way to ask subtly, "but not F'lar?" It wasn't precisely wrong for Robinton to consult with the bronze rider who led Menolly's fighting wing rather than the Weyrleader, but it was odd, and a clear omission.

"He and Lady Lessa and Lady Kylara are still in conference," Robinton said. "You might find it to your advantage to be gone when the meeting ends."

Despite a frisson of alarm, Menolly refused to be hustled. "Why, Masterharper, what's the news?"

"Jaxa has expressed a desire to stand as a candidate for Impression."

Menolly sucked a breath in in sudden comprehension - and let it out explosively. "That's not my fault," she protested, aware of how indignant she sounded. "We didn't search her, Heralth and I."

"Of course, of course," Robinton soothed, his sharp eyes sincere. "But blame or thanks may find you, even so." Menolly frowned, then turned. Re-entering her unofficial classroom, she dismissed the children down to the Lower Caverns to see if the talk of empty cupboards had inspired more than learning. "And tell Manora," she told Avella, the oldest in the class, "that Felena's to mind you after the noon-day meal." The girl nodded, and led her age-mates out.

"And how is Heralth today?" Robinton asked amiably when Menolly's charges were taken care of.

She could not begrudge him the flattery, nor the betraying joy that lit her face at the thought of her dragon. "Heralth is very well," she assured him, "in good colour. We flew Thread over Telgar yestereve -" substituting the un-Timed calculation so smoothly that she thought even Robinton might not notice, "and were un-scored. He darts in the air like a note from one of your pipes." As she finished speaking, she closed her eyes briefly and called her fire-lizard fair from all the places around the Weyr where they liked to sun themselves. She caught brief glimpses and feelings, like sweetsand bubbles popping. Brown Mimic, high above her. Blue Uncle, near the Lower Caverns. They gathered, at her call, with Heralth, at her own weyr.

"I would expect no less," Robinton was assuring her.

 _He likes me,_ Heralth told her smugly.

 _His judgment is respected all over Pern,_ Menolly agreed, aware of how fond she sounded and unwilling to temper it with awareness of the Masterharper's flattery.

She had first met the Masterharper of Pern when she had arrived at Benden Weyr, and had been overawed when so illustrious a person praised her: first for her command of her fire lizard companions, then for the tunes which had been sent to him all the way from her remote and humble hold. Even now, the memory of her embarrassed incredulity then - the _Masterharper_ , paying attention to a tuning _girl_ \- was almost enough to make her blush, though she thought she might count him a friend in the present time. Certainly an ally. She had helped him train his own fire lizards, and provided - somewhat unwittingly - a conduit she knew he valued to the doings of the Weyr.

"Does Lessa blame me, then?" she asked carefully. "For stealing her heir away?" Some, she thought, might say seducing - but Robinton was not one of them. Robinton's eyes met hers briefly; he glanced at the passage they were approaching as if to say that they were walking through common areas, and the matter was not best discussed widely.

From Half Circle's coast, Menolly had brought fire lizards to the Weyr. She was still, unofficially, the Weyr's expert on their care, even though anyone with sense directed fire lizard praise to Kylara and Kylara's lovely queen. That queen's egg had been found with Menolly's help shortly after Menolly arrived at Benden. Once the Weyrwoman had secured for herself one of the rarest creatures on Pern, the southern expedition had departed. Menolly had not realised until later that Kylara's uncompromising desire for prestige had set the timing of that endeavour.

It was probably best that Talina, not Menolly, had not impressed Arwith - and not just, Menolly thought, because that would have sundered her forever from her beloved Heralth! Had she returned to Benden as a queen rider _and_ with nine fire lizards bonded to her, the Weyr's senior queen rider might have considered her a threat, rather than an asset.

But she had done her best to be an asset. She had assisted with the care and training of Kylara's fire lizard as deftly and deferentially as she could. Then F'lar had schemed to curry favor with high-ranking Holders, and decided that eggs would be distributed as gifts of favour - and Menolly had been tasked to supervise the Impression of those eggs on occasions when Kylara did not choose to.

Ruatha Hold was one of the places that Menolly had been sent in the Weyrwoman's stead. There was a history there that a young blue rider could only grasp at. Lady Holder Lessa had accepted the Weyr's gift with some reserve; her egg had auspiciously hatched a bronze. 

Present at that Hatching had been Jaxa, oldest of Ruatha's heirs. A longing, perhaps, had been kindled, if Jaxa now sought not a fire lizard but a dragon. 

Menolly could hardly be sure that this would bring joy to Ruatha's Lady. And the Weyrwoman would not look kindly on the idea that the diplomatic gesture had caused trouble through succeeding too well.

Striding through Benden's halls to her own weyr, where Heralth waited, Menolly stretched Harper-trained memory to bring to mind the unusual circumstances of Ruathan descent. Lessa was the daughter of the previous rightful Holder of Ruatha, and the Holder before him, in an unbroken line. But Fax, of High Reaches blood and far higher ambition, had conquered Ruatha, among many other holds. He had intended to kill Lessa along with all her family, but through cunning, she had survived.

A duel between F'lar, riding on Search, and Fax, enemy of dragonmen, had ended in F'lar's favour. In his last hour, Fax had declared that his spouse's male child would succeed him. But although the Lady Gemma was in labour, she brought forth the female infant Jaxa. 

Contesting Jaxa's claim, Lessa, until then living in hiding at the Hold, had stepped forward to claim her rights.

F'lar, impressed by her mettle, had made a counter-offer: Lessa should come to Benden Weyr, leave Ruatha to other contenders, and impress Benden's only golden queen.

Lessa had refused. 

The Council of Holders, in confirming the rights of the last of the Ruathan Blood, had charged Lessa with the duty of raising Jaxa as a daughter of the Hold, without prejudice against her late father, and without usurping the place of her mother, Gemma, also of Ruathan blood. Presumably the thought of Blood privilege diminishing had sat uneasily with them. Presumably they had thought that there was little to gain in contesting Ruatha, then the poorest - if proudest - of Fax's former holds, and that richer pickings lay in Fax's other territories. Perhaps they had thought she must choose, in time, a man to handfast to who would secure her power, and one of their own sons might suit.

Of course, Turns later, Lessa had defied opinion by taking Lytol, a former dragonrider, as her spouse. Tradition decreed that a dragonrider could not Hold in his own name, and so could not inherit even if she died. She secured no allies with that choice, but perhaps secured her position. And a choice of heirs.

Tolsar would be four Turns now, Menolly supposed, and Kalestra two.

Menolly supposed that such a difficult history might have led to a fraught relationship between Lessa and Jaxa. Lessa had an austere manner. Offering instruction on the stages of a fire lizard's early growth, and what to expect from its maturation, Menolly had been struck by Lessa's keen intelligence and prickly pride. There was nothing soft about her, and it was possible that extended to maternal affection.

And yet, from the little she had seen of them together, Menolly felt instinctively that there was something beyond duty binding Lessa and Jaxa. Whether it was warm accord - or something colder than duty - she could not say.

So was Jaxa's sudden, unorthodox petition defiance of the way she had been raised? Was it a bitter withdrawal from a Hold where she stood in the way of the Lady Holder's Blood inheriting? Was it something else?

There was a tradition in the Weyr that blue and green dragons had the keenest sense for which Hold- and Craft-bred youngsters might Impress a dragon - but Heralth hadn't said a thing to Menolly! Not that it would matter, Menolly supposed, if that was what others chose to imagine.

The other reason she might be blamed, Menolly realised, was that Jaxa could make a case for herself if she had a strong bond with Lessa's bronze fire lizard. If Lessa's companion answered as willingly to Jaxa as to his true master - or nearly enough - then Kylara and F'lar would be sorely pressed to turn away a promising candidate, even if it was what Lessa wanted. Even though candidates willing to fight Thread - overwhelmingly male, despite Menolly, despite Mirrim - were far more desperately needed than women to impress gold, Menolly did not think the Weyrleaders would turn Jaxa down.

They had reached Menolly's weyr, now, and it was empty of Path and Mirrim, who shared it. It was a mark of Menolly's preoccupation that she could not call to mind if they were on a Timed errand, or on sweep, or absent on their own business... But it would not matter; someone would tell Mirrim where Menolly had gone. Menolly let the door-hanging fall, and gathered up her gitar and her precious scrolls. "I presume you have an opinion on Jaxa's candidacy," she said. "Not to presume what the Weyr will decide decide, but to guess will happen if it does."

"A knot untied," the Masterharper confessed, rolling out knots in his own shoulders as Heralth stirred and Menolly made his harness ready. "But if she tries and fails?"

Menolly nodded, biting her lip. It seemed that Ruatha's Heir had a taste for leaps into the unknown.

"I have little more to tell you, Menolly," the Masterharper said, lightly but firmly. "Shall we away to the Hall? Heralth?"

Double flattery, and another diversion. Robinton often addressed the dragons directly, but few knew that it was because he could speak to them directly, and they willingly spoke to him. It was a talent few had even in the Weyr, and to display it in front of Menolly was to express a confidence.

Menolly let herself wonder, briefly, about the unseen, unreachable Pern in which both Lady Lessa and Masterharper Robinton rode a-dragonback.

But worlds like that were set apart by more than time. She stepped up to mount Heralth, beautiful and brave, and extended a hand to Robinton to assist him to climb astride a dragon in the ordinary course of things.

* * *

Menolly dreamed, warm. The deep, dark hollows of a long, exhausted night should not have been easily disturbed, but she thought she heard Mirrim in the corridors, Mirrim perhaps beside her furs, footfalls succeeded by the comfortable, discordant noises of someone discarding outer clothing and settling her other affairs. Mirrim was in her bed, twined around her.... laughing. 

Menolly loved Mirrim's laugh, even though it was just as often sharp and mocking, punctuation to her pithiest wit, as it was happy. It was a real thing that made grey double-timed days brighter. It was solidity. Mirrim laughed, and pinched her - not hard, not to the point where Menolly would tell her to stop, but once as a warning, and then deliberately, provokingly, darting her fingers over Menolly's body and aiming her jabs precisely as if Menolly were a woollen blanket she were folding or rolled-out pastry dough she were nipping and smoothing into shape. Menolly liked it when she had Mirrim's undivided attention and there was a certain overlap between that and being Mirrim's project. Menolly twisted and wriggled like a fish on a line, soon provoked into laughing herself. She crawled out of caverns into consciousness. "I want to sleep," she murmured - despite what she would have said if she had been even a little more awake.

"You missed me. You wanted to know when I came back," Mirrim retorted. Belatedly, Menolly registered the faint, scrubbed-away scent of phosphine, felt a wet end of Mirrim's hair slide across her shoulder, could feel how jittery and awake Mirrim was, just coming down from the second wind that would have sustained her upon landing after Threadfall.

Mirrim said, "Let me..." She slid her cheek along Menolly's breast where it wasn't tucked under Menolly's arm, and Menolly rolled so that she had all the warmth of the furs and all the warmth, too, of Mirrim - already, efficiently naked - spread across her. Mirrim let out a keyed-up sigh, and Menolly waited to see what would come at the end of that sigh - waited, enjoying the contact, and was just starting to fall half-asleep again, when Mirrim's hand slid down to Menolly's thigh.

Menolly made a tired, agreeable noise, and Mirrim's hand moved immediately between Menolly's legs, soon sliding fingers up and across Menolly's clit. It was abrupt, as Mirrim often was in this mood, but it was neither too much, nor too soon, but plenty. It was soon more, as Menolly began to encourage Mirrim with a tightening arm wrapped around her, three of her fire lizards humming her feelings for her.

She was too sleepy to orgasm - that was clear within minutes, or at least it was clear that she didn't care to rouse herself enough to try. She made a pleasee noise instead when Mirrim hit a just-sweet-enough sensation that she thought she'd carry back into sleep with her - a sensation that could seep into her dreams. "All right. All right," Mirrim said. "Now hold me, that's all," and Menolly did, both arms now slung around Mirrim and her face pressed into Mirrim's side as Mirrim got herself efficiently off, reached for another peak, sucked her fingers clean, and then kissed Menolly with her own tang on her lips. She slid down into the hides beside Menolly and settled more securely into Menolly's arms. Menolly spared a drifting thought to ask Heralth about Path.

 _She is well_ , Heralth said, with the slightly disapproving implication that he, Heralth, would have let Menolly know of harm that had come to his preferred mate.

Menolly slept.

She woke to a warm bed rumpled by its most recent occupant. The space offered by hides and quilts was generous - and unkind. Mirrim _knew_ how she liked to wake to a body beside her, especially when the days before had contained Thread, especially when one of them had arrived back late from sweep or from patrol, and the night hadn't been shared. It had been Menolly's preference even back on the Southern Continent, when the pact two wary young riders had made to get each other through their dragons' first mating flight had turned, very quickly, into more. It was a preference Menolly had expressed as eloquently as she could when they took up their lives in Benden, daring others and tradition to challenge them.

But Mirrim was stubborn on this point. And Heralth said placatingly, _I am here_. And as she widened her awareness, Beauty and Auntie One creeled (in response to her emotions, not to hunger - Mirrim had fed them already) and she heard Mirrim move in the antechamber beyond her.

"I'm to help in the Caverns for the morning meal," Mirrim reminded her, her own Reppa and Lok and Tolly having alerted her to Menolly's wakefulness. "And then it's harness-checking with the new riders."

Menolly yawned and made a production of it, which was her own way of conceding Mirrim's rising, of praising her for being so helpful and necessary to the efficient functioning of the Weyr. 

Mirrim bustled closer and put a hand on her forehead, and then was gone.

 _She cares for you_ , Heralth said, and sent an echo of his own, all-encompassing feeling for Menolly: warmth and love and pride and confidence. Which was very nice, especially as it was a dragon attempt at echoing human feelings, and Menolly praised Heralth for it, but - 

It would have been nice to wake with Mirrim just a sleepy outfling of limbs away, because Path's wing had risen to flame Thread the previous night, and today it was Heralth and Menolly's turn. And it would be longer than a day before she saw her lover again, because today was a stretched day. There was Threadfall in two hours, and then there would be clean-up, and the wings that had fought would jump back in time to partway through the morning, when they had already gone. That way, necessary rearrangements could be made in case of any injury in the wings; harnesses could be swapped out, and the dragons could be fed. Today, the Masterharper was due to visit the Weyr again, and so if all went well, he would visit Menolly for a lesson, and then she would sleep through the stolen second doubled hours of her afternoon, and rise again to fight Thread.

There were charts that hung in the cave complex nearest the Hatching Grounds, where no guest to the Weyr was invited, and those charts were hallowed and inflexible. They marked the Timings allotted to each wing in fighting Thread. Mistake your place in Time and you could erase yourself from existence like a hand smoothing over a sand ledger. Triple your presence in one moment across Pern, instead of doubling it, and you would be dizzy and disordered, unfit to fight. Not that doubling wasn't hard enough on human and dragonkind.

Dragon time never gave as much as it took. Even the youngest and freshest of Benden's dragonriders had learned that the hard way.

Menolly kept her own chart - not quite a copy, but a derivative of the great Weyr charts that showed Thread and decreed timing. It was a notation of the hours that she had doubled, and Mirrim's doubled hours. They were of an age; after she had been granted responsibilities to check and collate old Weyr records and copy those that threatened to fade beyond usefulness, Menolly had made it a whimsical project to look up Benden records close to Mirrim's birth and determine just _how_ close in age they were.

Close enough, it proved, that here and there the Thread schedule made one older than the other, and reversed the order again, by according days to Menolly while Mirrim lived in ordinary time, and then swinging back the other way.

It had begun as a whimsical project, but now Menolly kept it for reasons of deep feeling she didn't entirely understood. She hadn't even told Mirrim when she marked the most recent Turning of her own personal birth year, in an entirely different season to the one in which she had been born.

Existing in two times at once made humans tired and uncertain - the dragons seemed to experience ill effects. When the the first timing experiments had been carried out at Benden Weyr in the Ninth Pass, R'gul, one of the most senior bronze riders, had complained: men could not live like that. It could not be borne.

And yet what choice did they have? There was only hope that the dragons could breed faster than weary riders could send them aloft to fall.

At Benden, in the Ninth Pass, you learned the difference between today and yesterday until it was a thing a blind man could grip, or that a deaf man could smell. Something a faltering dragon could use to find home.

Despite Menolly's gloomy thoughts, she and Heralth flew Thread adequately, with one serious injury in her own wing and one in K'net's. She had time, after helping to dress green Palanth's shoulder - at least the stray pair of Threads had avoided searing the delicate membrane of the wing! - to clean herself up and ready herself for the Masterharper's visit.

Robinton had a smile for her, an easy evasion of her question about when a new, _trained_ Harper would be assigned to Benden Weyr, and an unfamiliar scroll.

"I suspect you never learned the Question Song," he said, unrolling it as Menolly pulled stools together for them in front of the rough desk. "Once a Teaching Song, I believe, but it fell out of favour before I was born..." They were in Menolly's classroom again, which had barely escaped being returned to its status as a store-room only last week. The cave was at least deep enough within Benden's complex that a discordant note would not spread irritation.

"I don't know it by that name," Menolly said, frowning. But the first few notes the Harper strummed had her lifting her head in startled recognition, and she broke into song alongside the Masterharper; C'gan had taught her the strange, yearning melody, and she sang more from memory than from the lyrics noted on the Masterharper's scroll.

But the scroll was too short. Menolly realised her mistake as the second verse ended. The Masterharper strummed the notes that Menolly remembered as introducing the final verse; but it was too soon for the song to end. C'gan had taught her a verse that was not on the Masterharper's scroll.

"Have they flown-" Robinton sang, and stopped, glancing inquiringly at Menolly.

"C'gan taught me a variation," Menolly said, and her mentor's gaze sharpened. 

"Fascinating. I've never heard of any."

She tried to remember it. "Gone away, gone ahead..." - that part reproduced the first verse - "By the gleaming white hide led..." She frowned. "Perhaps it wasn't kept because it was a nonsense embellishment. What could white hide mean?" White animals were hardly common on Pern. Even runnerbeasts were at best a pale grey or dull tan. Of course, leather could be bleached... Had the song once said white _eye_ , perhaps?

"More nonsensical than the song itself?"

Menolly shrugged, unwilling to disclose all of her speculations. She remember asking Brekke about the song back at Southern, remember Mirrim boldly suggesting that the song referred to the vanished dragonmen who once had populated five other Weyrs on the Northern continent - and implied that they had travelled somehow into their own future to relieve desperate Benden of the burden she bore alone.

That theory had been quickly dispelled. Brekke had reminded them of riders lost without references to precise times - and reminded them how draining a trip of a few decades had been. "Four hundred turns, it would have to be. How would they know to come? How many riders would arrive?" Both the weyrlings had been silenced at the idea, dawning on them simultaneously, that the long-ago Weyrfolk had left their weyrs - and never arrived where they had planned to go.

Robinton, of course, was aware of the awesome ability of dragons to weave through Time. How could he not - when he had met Menolly herself as a girl of fifteen Turns, and met her in the same year having grown to nineteen? He was a friend to the Weyr and spoke for Benden in council against increasingly agitated Holders. But he was not _of_ the Weyr, and Menolly felt instinctively that the answers to the Question Song were not for him.

"Let's try it again," she suggested now, flattening down the scroll's edges, and Robinton did not press her.

* * *

Pridith had risen to mate immediately after Wirenth and Arwith had last departed; in a Pass, dragon gestation was short, and so was the time it took for eggs to harden on the Hatching Sands. Scarcely a month after the Lady of Ruatha arrived to consult with the Weyrleaders about her heir's desire to stand for Impression, the opportunity presented itself; Pridith had laid a rare queen egg, and the Weyr rejoiced.

Hatching days were golden times, oases in the desert of battle. Menolly didn't know how the queen dragons did it - though she was plenty curious! - but somehow the all the Hatching days for which she had been present at Benden had fallen on days when no Thread fell on Pern. Some instinct, perhaps guided by a queen's rider. It wasn't just that Kylara had the knack of it - Vanira had it too.

Any other day could be folded up on itself until the edges blackened with crisped Thread. On a Hatching day, all the Weyr came together at the same time, and that they _could_ was a benediction and a ritual far beyond what the Holders shared.

The Holders - Menolly was amused at herself. Despite her folded Turns, she wasn't so far off being one of them.

But she was far off what they had ever imagined for her. She rose and fed her fire lizards and washed Heralth with a song in her throat and in her tapping fingers, reminding herself of the programme for today's feast, when the dragons were hatched and the mood was entirely merry.

The Duty Song, of course... then the song she'd written for Kylara of the greater and and the lesser queen flying together... perhaps the Name Song, carefully amended to honour the Holder guests and the places they hailed from today...

"Lessa's here."

As if in apology for her customary early-morning industry, Mirrim had made a point of coming by the Lower Caverns - where a ragged crew rehearsed to the pleasure of the provisional Weyrharper against the background of cooking noise - every time she and Path returned to the Weyr bringing another Hatching guest.

It wasn't a bad time to take a rest, and in a sudden access of pragmatism, Menolly decided that her fellow performers had all rehearsed as much as would benefit them. She raised her hand - a Master's hand for how earnestly they followed it, even she would never attain that craft rank at the Weyr - and let them scatter.

"What did you think of her?" Menolly asked, teasing.

It was neither Menolly's place to ask nor Mirrim's place to tell, but that sort of thing had never stopped Mirrim.

"Took well to riding a dragon," Mirrim said, as casually as if that wasn't currency for gossip throughout the Weyr. "Her firelizard followed us close, and landed with us." Its name, too - undisclosed by the Lady Holder - was the stuff of gossip.

Menolly nodded, circumspectly pleased that Lessa had trained her fire lizard well. Not that it mattered today. On another day, how Lessa, the Lady Holder of Ruatha, handled her fire lizard might be valued gossip. Today, what mattered was whether the girl she had fostered would impress.

* * *

The guests of Hold and Hall filled out the stands, leaving the benches closest to golden Pridith empty as much from natural wariness of her great size as from courtesy to the Weyrfolk. The candidates filed out onto the sand. Beside Menolly, T'gor, blue Relth's rider, craned unashamedly to see them. "Jaxa's there," Mirrim said, her pointed tone a rebuke.

"Has the look of Fax to her, doesn't she?" T'gor said, not one whit abashed.

"I wouldn't know," Mirrim replied, dripping even more acid in case he'd missed it.

The young woman did seem to take more after her father than Lady Gemma, whose portrait Menolly had seen when she had brought fire lizards to Ruatha Hold. Jaxa was square-jawed and could not have been called pretty. Still, Menolly reflected, she had never yet seen the girl smile.

T'gor wasn't the only watcher darting gazes between Jaxa and Lady Lessa, her back iron-straight on one of the more elevated seats. The tiny, dark-haired woman had a presence almost as tangible as Kylara's. Menolly wouldn't voice the wonder in public - not where Mirrim would hear and scold her for it - but she remembered the stories about the Search that had elevated Lessa to the position of Holder and marked Jaxa's birth. Her mind shied from the idea of refusing Weyr Search. Had Lessa ever regretted her choice?

 _How would she know what she has to regret?_ Heralth asked, surprisingly philosophical.

As the guests settled, more and more of the Weyrfolk turned their eyes to Menolly. The dragon's hum would begin the hatching, and her fire lizards had attuned her to it. She nodded, now, as it began, mentally inviting her own gold Beauty to bring in Kylara for one of the sweeping entrances the Weyrwoman loved so well. The rising dragon song sounded as though it were in tribute to the queen's rider, not the queen's clutch.

"They hum in tune, now," Mirrim murmured. "They never did that before you came."

Mirrim was Weyrbred, true, but how many Hatchings could she possibly have attended, and how many since childhood? Menolly totted them up in her head, smiled, and wisely did not reply.

The rest of Menolly's fair flew to join her, arranging themselves on the bench behind her, humming so loudly that she barely heard it when the first egg cracked.

Blue; not counted as good an omen as bronze, but good enough for Menolly, who would never forget the first time she had looked into Heralth's eyes.

Tavin and Ransebor were the closest weyrlings; Menolly saw Ransebor hesitate. Menolly remembered B'rant, killed fighting Thread. Now the duty fell to his son. It was not a comfortable thought. She loved Heralth and she flew to fight Thread with fervor equal to anyone else's, but Weyr life was not all glory.

"His name is Noth," T'vin cried out, and the audience sighed in approval.

Mirrim squeezed her hand warningly. "The queen egg is cracking."

Menolly glanced away from two boys trying to entice a creeling green, and saw the glistening dragon-child spill out onto the sands. Larger at birth, the queens were often the clumsiest of the new dragons. They made up for it later, of course, Menolly thought, scrupulously careful to avoid insult to Pridith even in her own head, but it was best for everyone if the hatchling Impressed quickly and her new rider could keep her out of trouble.

Jaxa stepped forward, and just as confidently, so did the weyrbred Celina.

Just like that, Impression was made. "Her name is Lamanth!" Celina cried. Jaxa's fists clenched at her sides.

There would be another chance, surely. Jaxa was only fourteen, young enough for other Hatchings. If the Masterharper's opinion was sound - and when was it not? - Jaxa Impressing was the simplest way to cut the tangle of Ruatha's succession, and that she had chosen it for herself had soothed and relieved at least as many of the prominent folk across Pern as it had stirred and riled.

"Celina could have stood to wait another Hatching," Mirrim muttered; Menolly let herself grin, knowing that Mirrim had clashed with the woman often enough before now and did not relish the advantage that dragon rank would give.

Jaxa raised her head, looking across the sands first at Lessa - then directly at Menolly, her hopes broadcast as plainly as if she had been one of Menolly's own fire lizards herself. 

When Mirrim and Menolly had returned to Benden riding Path and Heralth, some women had joined the wary voices calling Menolly M'noll - a title she had firmly refused - and other girls had tried to emulate them in catching the attention of green, blue, and even brown dragons. 

None, so far, had succeeded. _You, my dear,_ Menolly told her dragon, _are very special indeed._ Heralth sent her a wave of contented agreement.

It was a forlorn hope for Jaxa especially: almost all of the dragons had found riders now. Only a brown and a green still staggered on the sands, and the candidates had correspondingly thinned. It had been a clean Hatching - no blood soaked into the grounds to show where an unguided dragon had clashed with a clumsy candidate.

"How many bronzes?" Menolly asked Mirrim in a low murmur. Mirrim shrugged, and passed the question on to T'gor.

Her lover's face was still turned away when Menolly saw it. As Celina led Lamanth away, one of the biggest of Lamanth's egg shards rolled from a teetering position. Behind it, Menolly saw the clutch's smallest and last egg, paler than those that had hatched already. Jaxa saw it too.

Menolly hadn't remembered that there was an undersized egg in this clutch, though its odds of hatching must have been discussed in the Weyr. Menolly had never seen it herself, but she knew that it happened, sometimes. Just as with whers or avians, dragon eggs weren't always viable. Old Nemorth's clutches had been notorious for it. 

Kylara must be furious.

"Just three," Mirrim was saying to Menolly, and began to rattle off their names, but Menolly was too distracted to hear. She saw Jaxa, square jaw set like granite, pick up a shard from Lamanth's egg and smash it across the uncracked one.

Pridith stirred above Jaxa's head, and even Mirrim drew her breath in, but the great queen merely curved her neck to look Jaxa in the eye, and crooned over her last egg. The Weyrfolk, as if one body, looked to Kylara and F'lar.

Then there was a commotion in the stands. Lessa had risen, and with surprising speed - though somehow giving a sense of force, rather than haste - descended to the sands, crossing them to speak to her wayward ward. Menolly saw Kylara, about to march on from the other direction, pause. 

They made a strange triangle - girl and Lady Holder and dragon, enclosing an egg that was only barely taller than the slight Holder Lady. There was no overhearing the tense conversation between the the two women. 

Then Lessa took a knife from her belt and handed it to Jaxa, who smashed the hilt into the egg's shell.

Now Kylara was running, F'lar with her. They crossed the sands in long strides, but were too late to interfere. Jaxa's strokes were sure and well-placed, and when the egg cracked, she dug at the cracks, sliding the blade in surely to prize out her prize without harming dragonflesh, as if someone had taught her how.

One way or another, the dragon was emerging.

But would it emerge living?

A cry went up from spectators closer than Menolly with the answer to a different question. "A white dragon!"

A shiver passed through Menolly, like the feeling that had gripped her when she'd seen the Red Star bracketed for the first time by the Star Stones, or when she'd first flown Heralth to meet Thread, with none of the fear of those times, but only urgent alertness.

Smaller than the girl who had freed it, the dragon lurched towards Jaxa. Menolly saw Lessa step swiftly back, and in the midst of her anxiety, spared a darkly amused thought for what the Lords and Leaders would make of it all if the _Lady Holder of Ruatha_ impressed such an unexpected dragon, fourteen years after the chance had been offered to her to impress a queen. No: one thing in all of this seemed destined to go right. Jaxa raised her head to the stands, meeting with defiance the hundred wide eyes fixed upon her.

"His name is Ruth!"

So she had something in common with Menolly. Perhaps of all the weyrfolk, Menolly was the first to smile.

 _White dragon, white dragon_... The logical connection formed in the way it only could on a Thread-free, single-time day, when they all were exactly themselves at one point in time. C'gan's verse had spoken of a white hide.

Leading dragons to empty the Weyrs.

Menolly opened her mouth in shock and quickly closed it again, hoping not even Mirrim had seen. There was enough scandal to go around today, and she didn't want anyone else's thoughts going in the direction hers had gone until she was sure. What if the tiny dragon did not survive to maturity? What if she was wrong about the Question Song? 

But, what if the lost Weyrs had followed a special dragon through the centuries? A dragon with unique abilities - that could defy the limits placed on others by Time? What if they had abandoned their past - and had not yet arrived to rescue Benden because that could only happen when the right dragon was hatched to lead them?

She would scour the records until she found C'gan's variation. She would aid Jaxa in her care of Ruth in any way she could. And while she nurtured her hopes, she would fight with the Weyr, until its luck and its fighting spirit ran out.

Or, until...

**Author's Note:**

> This AU keeps the following points from [the timeline worked out here](http://pern.srellim.org/time.htm):  
> 2494: Fax takes Ruatha  
> 2500: Menolly born  
> 2505: Search at Ruatha  
> 2508: Ninth Pass  
> 2515: Menolly runs away from Half Circle Sea Hold.
> 
> Here, Kylara impresses Nemorth's last queen egg; C'gan does not die in the first Fall; a different sequence of events establishes the parameters for Timing, and Benden Weyr comes to believe that a leap such as Lessa dared is impossible (for now).
> 
> (However, Ruth's unique confidence in points in time will soon prove useful....)
> 
> I have given riders' dragons the same names they have in canon where possible - Doylistically because I felt it made it easier to follow; Watsonianly, if you like, on the premise that dragons (subconciously?) settle on their names in the moment of matching to a rider. Some liberties are taken with the names of Benden inhabitants and the order of Hatchings. I hope that's okay!
> 
> Thanks to p. for much encouragement and brainstorming help!


End file.
